{"id":1281,"date":"2020-02-27T15:03:52","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T15:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2020-02-27T19:41:55","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T19:41:55","slug":"funcraft-raises-1-8-million-for-casual-forever-mobile-game-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/funcraft-raises-1-8-million-for-casual-forever-mobile-game-development","title":{"rendered":"FunCraft raises $1.8 million for casual forever mobile game development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>FunCraft, a new studio headed by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans, has raised $1.8 million to make  what the call \u201ccasual forever\u201d mobile games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The investment was led by Play Ventures, reports GamesBeat, with contributions from Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, the CEOs of Gucci and Huuuge Games, plus the co-founders of Allbirds, Harry&#8217;s and Warby Parker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The San Francisco-based studio was founded last year by Michael Martinez and Jason McGuirk, a venture that reunites them after their previous studio JuiceBox Games shut down in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Martinez left his role as a studio general manager at Electronic Arts to co-found this business, while McGuirk had been worked as an engineer at Zynga, a company both had served at for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking to GamesBeat, Martinez said FunCraft&#8217;s goal is to &#8220;create new genres and make mobile games that are daily rituals in our players&#8217; lives.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The focus will be on what the duo refer to as &#8220;casual forever&#8221; games, with Candy Crush, Zynga Poker and Dice With Buddies offered as examples. But Martinez was keen to differentiate this from current match-three puzzlers and hypercasual games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;One of the lessons we learned from JuiceBox is we don&#8217;t want to compete with the strengths of industry behemoths like King, Playrix, Peak and Voodoo. We think we are creating a market that larger companies will be interested in two to three years from now. We think we can do to puzzle games what Peak with Toon Blast did for match-3 games by adding social and a deeper metagame.&#8221;<\/p><cite>Michael Martinez, FunCraft Co-founder<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FunCraft, a new studio headed by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans, has raised $1.8 million to make what the call \u201ccasual forever\u201d mobile games. The investment was led by Play Ventures, reports GamesBeat, with contributions from Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, the CEOs of Gucci and Huuuge Games, plus the co-founders of Allbirds, Harry&#8217;s and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1282,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[262],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1300,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}